The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1, of 28 plus Index
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The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia Volume 1, of 28 plus Index
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The Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
A. This letter of ours corresponds to the first symbol inthe Phoenician alphabet and in almost all its descendants. InPhoenician, a, like the symbols for e and for o, did notrepresent a vowel, but a breathing; the vowels originally werenot represented by any symbol. When the alphabet was adopted bythe Greeks it was not very well fitted to represent the soundsof their language. The breathings which were not required inGreek were accordingly employed to represent some of the vowelsounds, other vowels, like i and u, being represented byan adaptation of the symbols for the semi-vowels y and w.The Phoenician name, which must have corresponded closely tothe Hebrew Aleph, was taken over by the Greeks in the formAlpha (alpsa). The earliest authority for this, as for thenames of the other Greek letters, is the grammatical drama(grammatike Ieoria) of Callias, an earlier contemporary ofEuripides, from whose works four trimeters, containing the namesof all the Greek letters, are preserved in Athenaeus x. 453 d.
The form of the letter has varied considerably. In theearliest of the Phoenician, Aramaic and Greek inscriptions(the oldest Phoenician dating about 1000 B.C., the oldestAramaic from the 8th, and the oldest Greek from the 8thor 7th century B.C.) A rests upon its side thus—@. Inthe Greek alphabet of later time